Two Books on Autocracy, Dictatorship, and Tyranny: Autocracy, Inc. (Anne Applebaum); World of the Right (Rita Abrahamsen et al.) - Foreign Affairs

 Two Books on Autocracy, Dictatorship, and Tyranny

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

By Anne Applebaum

Doubleday, 2024, 224 pp.

World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order

By Rita Abrahamsen, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita, and Alexandra Gheciu

Cambridge University Press, 2024, 220 pp.

Reviewed by G. John Ikenberry

Foreign Affairs,  November/December 2024 (October 22, 2024)

 

Two studies offer fascinating portraits of the increasingly sophisticated and networked world of autocracy, dictatorship, and tyranny. Applebaum focuses on the growing connections among hard-core autocratic regimes, led by China, Russia, and Iran and joined by Venezuela, North Korea, Belarus, Sudan, and others. These illiberal states vary widely in their ideologies but are building a larger web of financial, military, technological, and diplomatic ties in their common efforts to evade Western sanctions and stay in power. Applebaum argues that what separates these autocratic states from softer illiberal and authoritarian regimes, such as those in Hungary, India, and Turkey, is the ruthlessness and reach of their dictatorial power and their deep hostility to the Western-led democratic world. Russia is the linchpin in this emerging counterhegemonic system, pioneering the modern model of kleptocracy and dictatorship, organized for the self-enrichment of its leaders, and turning its invasion of Ukraine into a wider ideological and geopolitical assault on the liberal international order. Applebaum argues that Western democracies must reckon with their complicity in the spread of kleptocratic autocracy through offshore banking, money laundering, business deals, and ideological support from right-wing fellow travelers.

The authors of World of the Right vividly map the intellectual and political ties of the increasingly globally connected radical right. Focusing primarily on nationalist and populist movements in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Latin America, the authors argue that these seemingly disparate groups have evolved into a global phenomenon. What they share is a common enemy: liberal elites, who from entrenched positions in the leading institutions of society and the administrative state, are conspiring to undermine sovereignty and traditional values. Such cosmopolitan liberals and technocratic experts threaten, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban put it, the “whole of Western civilization.” Through a far-flung network of conferences, think tanks, and political party organizations, the extreme right has increasingly configured itself as a loosely organized transnational radical movement. Its emphasis on civilizational identity and antipathy to liberal internationalism creates opportunities for entanglements with illiberal states, such as China and Russia, that share the goal of dethroning Western liberalism and the U.S.-led international order.

 

Tunisia, a primeira nação árabe a iniciar a primavera democrática é a última a recair na ditadura, depois de todas as outras - David D. Kirkpatrick (The New Yorker)

 Triste evolução da democrácia islâmica, estrangulada pelas suas contradições internas.

Tunisia Arrests Its Most Prominent Opposition Leader

Rached Ghannouchi has been a voice for democracy in his nation and across the Muslim world.

Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, was the last place where it failed. After a decade of freedom and democracy, in 2021 a new strongman, President Kais Saied, shut down the parliament and, soon after, began imposing an authoritarian constitution and arresting his critics. This week, the police finally came for Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s largest political party and the Arab world’s most influential thinker about the potential synthesis of liberal democracy and Islamic governance.

Born in 1941 to impoverished peasant farmers in remote southern Tunisia, Ghannouchi studied in Cairo, Damascus, and Paris; worked menial jobs in Europe; and returned to Tunis, in 1971. Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist politics was on the rise across the region, as an alternative to the autocracies in power, and, in 1981, Ghannouchi co-founded a Tunisian Islamist movement. He was jailed and tortured for three years, and in 1987 he was arrested again, sentenced to death, and exiled to London. (Other Arab states would not take him.)

Ghannouchi’s examination of Britain’s liberal democracy through an Islamic lens set him apart from a generation of Arab intellectuals. Islamic scholars had long ago concluded that in the true “Abode of Islam” a Muslim must feel secure in his liberty, property, religion, and dignity, Ghannouchi wrote in his landmark treatise, “Public Freedoms in the Islamic State,” which he began writing in prison and published, in Arabic, in 1993. So why had he found that security only in the West? A true Islamic state, he concluded, must be founded on “freedom of conscience” for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Quoting a revered twelfth-century scholar, Ghannouchi urged Islamists to learn from Western democracy—to benefit “from the best of human experiments regardless of their religious origins, since wisdom is Shari’a’s twin.”

He returned to Tunisia, in 2011, when a spontaneous wave of protests against police brutality drove its longtime ruler into exile and set the Arab Spring revolts in motion. Ghannouchi helped make the country’s political transition the most liberal in the region, and he did his best to salvage the prospects for democracy elsewhere. In the late spring of 2013—a decade ago—he flew to Egypt to offer advice to its first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. The hopefulness of those months is now difficult to remember. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had all held credible elections and had started drafting new charters. Western experts cited Yemen as a model for the peaceful handover of power. Even in Syria most rebels still marched under the banner of democracy, rather than of extremist Islam; the uprising had not yet devolved into a sectarian civil war. But a sandstorm was blowing toward Tahrir Square, where two and a half years earlier an eighteen-day sit-in, inspired by Tunisia, had toppled President Hosni Mubarak and opened the way for Morsi. Now Morsi’s opponents were calling for protests to demand his resignation, and the head of the armed forces was sending mixed signals about his allegiance.

Ghannouchi had spent more than two decades thinking and writing about the same promises that Egypt’s Muslim Brothers had campaigned on—combining Islamic governance with democratic elections and individual freedoms. During his trip to Cairo, he told me a few months later, at his party’s headquarters in Tunis, he had tried to convince Morsi that, in order to achieve those goals, he should voluntarily forfeit some power. (Morsi advisers later confirmed the broad outlines of Ghannouchi’s account, which he told me on the condition that I keep it private at the time.) After revolutions like those in Egypt and Tunisia, a majority party should understand the anxious vulnerability of political or religious minorities, such as Egypt’s secular-minded liberals and Coptic Christians. They had been afforded at least some protections under the old authoritarian order, and those were now gone, with little reason yet to trust promises about the rule of law, checks and balances, and individual rights. Precisely because of the Brotherhood’s electoral success—Morsi had already won ratification of the new constitution—in the interest of democracy and to reassure the Party’s weaker rivals, it should bring in a unity government ahead of another election. Why remain the lightning rod for his opponents’ fears or resentments? “The democracy of consensus succeeds—not the democracy of the majority,” Ghannouchi told me.

Morsi rejected that advice, convinced that yielding power under threat of protests would be a capitulation to political extortion and set a dangerous precedent.. Had Morsi followed Ghannouchi’s advice, perhaps he could have defused the protests that filled the streets on June 30th, demanding his ouster, or at least won over more Egyptian liberals. We’ll never know: on July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—now President Sisi, possibly for life—ousted Morsi from power, ending Egypt’s thirty-month experiment with democracy and freedom.

More than a thousand Egyptian Islamists were killed in the streets for opposing the coup. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Those who were underground or in exile demanded retribution against the ostensibly liberal factions who initially supported Sisi’s takeover. But Ghannouchi still urged reconciliation. “The Egyptian ship needs to include all Egyptians and not throw some of them into the water,” he told me. “There should be no collective punishment. The cure for a failed democracy is more democracy.”

In the months after the Egyptian coup, one Arab Spring revolt after another foundered in despair and extremism—a reversal of 2011, when the Tahrir Square sit-in stirred democracy movements in capitals across the region. Tunisia was the exception to the dark turn after the coup, in part because Ghannouchi followed his own advice there the following year. The Islamist party that he co-founded and led, Ennahdha, meaning “the renaissance,” had won the dominant role in a transitional parliament. By late 2013, the assassinations of a pair of left-leaning, secular politicians had brought the political process and constitution-drafting to a halt; opponents suspected Islamist extremists of carrying out the killings, and blamed Ennahdha for failing to prevent them. Ghannouchi, who held no elected office at the time, defied many in his party to reach a power-sharing agreement with the main leader of the secular opposition. Ennahdha voluntarily handed power to a caretaker government to oversee new elections. Ghannouchi’s concession broke the logjam. Tunisia’s revolution celebrated a fourth anniversary—it was the only Arab Spring uprising that appeared to succeed—and the civil-society organizations that helped sponsor the talks between Ghannouchi and the opposition received a Nobel Peace Prize. “We are not angels. We would like to have power,” Ghannouchi said on a visit to Washington. “But we fervently believe that a democratic constitution is more important.”

His leadership made Ennahdha a unique example of what some called liberal Islamism. In fact, Ghannouchi helped persuade Ennahdha leaders to jettison the label “Islamist” and to begin describing themselves as Muslim democrats. (He published an essay in Foreign Affairs explaining the change.) His party, which led the drafting of the constitution, pushed through a charter with explicit protections for the rights of women and of religious minorities. When we spoke in 2014, he also noted that Tunisia’s was one of the few Arab constitutions that made no reference to Islamic law. He assured me that Tunisia guaranteed freedoms for mosques, churches, synagogues—and even “pubs.” He stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriage but described sexuality as a strictly personal matter—a more liberal stance than that taken by almost any Arab government.

Tunisia’s tourism-heavy economy, however, never fully recovered from the images of turmoil in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising, and the pandemic shut down its resorts. Years of relative inaction by Tunisia’s caretaker government and its successors fuelled a backlash against the whole political class, and especially against Ennahdha. During the next elections, in 2019, Ghannouchi also made the questionable decision to seek a seat in parliament and was then chosen as its speaker. He had become a politician. Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam in exile from Egypt, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard, said, “That parliament was a circus—not a place for a leader of his intellectual calibre to preside over, and he was consumed by petty politics.”

In the 2019 elections, voters rejected every Presidential candidate who had held public office. Two populists—a prominent media mogul and an obscure law professor, who together received only a third of the vote—went to a runoff. The professor, Saied, won in a landslide. In many ways, Saied is an inverse of Ghannouchi. He has eschewed any known political philosophy or faction. He routinely rails against the West, directing particular vitriol toward the International Monetary Fund, whose support Tunisia now desperately needs. His constitution promises the state “will work to achieve the objectives of pure Islam” and gives the government control over Islamic interpretation and teaching. He has called gay people “deviants” and supported the criminalization of homosexuality. This year, in his own adaptation of “replacement theory,” he set off a wave of anti-Black violence by scapegoating dark-skinned African migrants for Tunisia’s economic travails.

Saied initially cited the crisis of the pandemic as a pretext to dissolve the parliament and to rule by decree. It was not long before he began detaining a long list of critics and opponents, culminating this week with Ghannouchi. His alleged crime involves a statement that he made last weekend: “Tunisia without Ennahdha, without political Islam, without the left or any of its components is a project for civil war.” Shortly before dusk and the breaking of the fast on Monday, the holiest night of Ramadan, more than a hundred plainclothes police officers raided his home, his party said in a statement. After two days in custody, Ghannouchi, now eighty-one, was interrogated for eight hours. On Thursday, a judge sentenced him to an extended pretrial detention. Initially accused of incitement, he now faces charges of conspiring against the security of the state—a crime that can carry the death penalty.

The blow to Tunisian democracy is clear. But the imprisonment of a leader as singular as Ghannouchi is also a setback to the wider world. For Islamists who espouse violence, his imprisonment is a vindication—new evidence of the futility of the ballot box. And the silencing of his voice is a loss to the West, too.

“Marrying Islam and liberalism and democratic governance,” Robert Kagan, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, told me, “is the solution to our problems in the Arab world, and it is the solution to their problem with us.” That was also the hope that Ghannouchi tried to salvage in Egypt ten years ago.

Ghannouchi, in a prerecorded video released on Thursday, urged patience. He told Tunisians, “Trust in the principles of your revolution, and that democracy is not a passing thing in Tunis.”

Ditaduras e repressao na America Latina:book reviews

Krepp on Iber, 'Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America' [review]

by System Administrator

Patrick Iber. Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. Cambridge:    Harvard University Press, 2015. 336 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-28604-7.

Reviewed by Stella Krepp (University of Bern)
Published on H-LatAm (March, 2017)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz

Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America is a study of the transnational political Left in Latin America. Suitably titled with a quote by Leon Trotsky, who in many ways epitomized the struggle within the political Left in Mexico, it relates how the project of a social democracy failed.

In the past two decades, scholars have called for new ways to write the history of a Latin American Cold War that would allow for Latin American agency and voices.[1] As a result, historians have highlighted the local roots of the conflict; illuminated the inter-American dimension; and examined how Latin Americans colluded, shaped, and resisted the Cold War.[2] However, by and large, scholarship still emphasizes a Cold War paradigm that places US-Latin American relations in the context of anti-communist struggle and US security policies, focusing the attention of Left and Right alike on military interventions, economic influence, and diplomatic relations to the detriment of cultural aspects of international relations.[3] This makes Patrick Iber’s book on the cultural dimension of the Cold War within Latin America a very welcome contribution.

Highlighting the role of intellectuals as “privileged communicators” between the masses and the state (p. 1), Iber directs his focus not at the authoritarian Right but at the fragmented political Left in Latin America, more specifically Mexico, and its struggle regarding “how to bring about a humane socialism that would balance social justice and individual freedom” (p. 3). As Iber recounts, this was far from a united and solidary Left, but a fragmented one, and the major fault lines ran between the advocates of social democracy and proponents of socialism or communism. He advances this argument by studying the three major players in the Cultural Cold War—the Soviet Union, the United States, and Cuba—through their front organizations: the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Council (WPC); the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) financed through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and the Cuban Casa de las Américas, as each tried to mobilize and instrumentalize culture as a vehicle for its Cold War message and vision of social progress.

Iber convincingly relates how the cultural Cold War was rooted in the pre-Cold War history of the region, starting in the 1930s and 1940s, when exiles from the Spanish Civil War and communist dissidents such as Trotsky himself migrated to Mexico. These exiles carried with them the political divisions and animosities of their home societies. This “international civil war among left-wing intellectuals” acquired a new dynamic with the East-West confrontation after World War II (p. 47).

In chapter 2, Iber focuses on the WPC. Sponsored, supported, and guided by the Soviet Union, the WPC attempted to draft artists into a cultural Cold War through the promotion of “peace.” By the late 1950s, however, its never extensive influence had waned and was replaced by the Casa de las Américas as the defining cultural institution of the radical Left. Chapter 3 deals with the CCF. Backed by the United States and financed by the CIA, the CCF’s official aim was to promote social democracy and to denounce the totalitarian visions of the USSR and later Cuba. In one of the most fascinating accounts of the book, Iber narrates how the CCF nurtured the political Left in Cuba throughout the 1950s, and thus unwittingly enabled the revolution to succeed. In the end, the unmasking of the CCF as CIA-backed in the late 1960s spelled out the end of the reformist project.

The turning point that transformed the political Left was, without doubt, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, a home-grown socialist model that soon replaced the Soviet Union as the reference point in Latin America. Likewise, the Cuban Casa de las Américas became the central institution to spread this socialist vision, a story explored by Iber in chapter 4. However, despite inspiring a generation of the political Left in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution also exacerbated the already existing rift within the Left. Many of the earlier supporters of Fidel Castro were forced into exile or severely punished, and soon the regime drew criticism for its authoritarian streak and political as well as cultural censorship.

Ultimately, as Iber relates, by the 1970s all three utopias had failed and with them the belief that intellectuals and artists could and should play a fundamental role in mediating these social visions. Rather, and this would be a fascinating theme for another book, we see the rise of social scientists and technocrats from the beginning of the 1960s. These utopias failed on many fronts, but particularly because of the inherent contradictions in their political programs. In the case of the CCF, preaching liberalism but stifling dissent showcased the very limited notion of freedom the organization promoted. More important, as political events such as the 1964 military coup in Brazil and the blatantly illegal US intervention in the Dominican Republic of 1965 showed, building a social democratic Left with a benevolent and friendly United States was nigh impossible.

Likewise, by the late 1960s, with Ernesto Guevara dead and his foco theory proven wrong, as well as the Cuban endorsement of the 1968 Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia, the Cuban model lost much of its appeal. In the case of the Casa de las Américas, proclaiming freedom but only within a very restrictive definition of the revolution along the lines of the famous dictum “within the revolution everything; against the revolution, nothing” led to disenchantment among the Left. Ultimately, these visions failed because every organization failed to practice what it preached.

Intriguingly, despite the close ideological and financial links with their backers, Iber shows how these front organizations were not simple instruments of hegemony, but hybrid organizations that allowed artists and activists to shape debates and “localize” the Cold War. Moving through different case studies, Iber demonstrates that distinct cultural and historic contexts mattered, just as much as the people who were involved. With his nuanced analysis, he denounces the view that the United States, and in consequence the CIA, was omnipotent or omnipresent. While the United States and the USSR financed and set the agenda for the cultural front organizations, local branches acquired their own dynamics and controlling staff or artists proved difficult to manage. In the end, the actions of the front organizations often had unintended consequences as the Cuban case aptly highlights. Iber narrates one such example in chapter 6, showing how the CCF successfully “modernized” and incorporated a number of Latin American voices in the Mexican case, while in the 1960s, such attempts yielded few results in Brazil and Argentina. Ultimately, modernization never fully materialized because CIA involvement in the CCF was uncovered in 1966-67.

Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom is a thought-provoking book and deserves much praise, so I have only minor quibbles to add. While the trope of Mexican exceptionalism is not helpful, one wonders if what Iber relates is truly a Latin American cultural war or, in essence, actually a Mexican one. While he offers excursions to Brazil, Argentina, and more extensively to Cuba, Mexico remains the pivotal center. Of course there are limits to the archival work historians can aspire to, but I was left wondering, as a non-Mexicanist, if the Mexican case was indicative for the whole region or rather a special case. My own impression is that the Cold War in South America acquired a very distinct trajectory. In sum, it raises the questions how to contextualize Mexican history in broader Latin American history.

This is a carefully crafted and elegantly written book that charts the ebb and flow of the cultural Cold War and simultaneously highlights the local Latin American dimension. The book is meticulously researched, and—no mean feat—an enjoyable read.

Notes

[1]. Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds, In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Greg Grandin, “Off the Beach: The United States, Latin America, and the Cold War,” in A Companion to Post-45 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); and Max Friedman, “Retiring the Puppets, Letting Latin America Back In: Recent Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations,” Diplomatic History 7, no. 5 (November 2003): 621-636.

[2]. For a good overview on recent scholarship, see Andrew J. Kirkendall, “Cold War Latin America: The State of the Field,” H-Diplo Essay 119, November 14, 2014. See also Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Ariel Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977-1984 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Centre of International Studies, 1997).

[3]. Gilbert Joseph, “Toward a New Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations,” in Close Encounters with Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Catherine LeGrand (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 3.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=48095

Citation: Stella Krepp. Review of Iber, Patrick, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. March, 2017.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48095

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Carmody on Weld, 'Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala' [review]

by System Administrator

Kirsten Weld. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. American Encounters/Global Interactions Series. Durham:    Duke University Press, 2014. xvi + 335 pp. $26.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-8223-7658-3; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-5602-8; $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-5597-7.

Reviewed by Michelle Carmody (Leiden University)
Published on H-LatAm (March, 2017)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz

Michelle Carmody on Kirsten Weld's Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

In critical studies of archives, it has become commonplace to cite Jacques Derrida’s phrase that “there is no political power without control of the archive ... [and] effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (p. 16). Kirsten Weld takes this as a departure point but moves on to examine a related question, namely, what the process of (re)constructing an archive tells us about the political context in which this (re)construction is carried out. She does this by examining the creation of the Archivo Histórico de la Policia Nacional (Historical Archives of the National Police, AHPN) in Guatemala, a collection of documents taken from the police archives where they were “discovered” in a state of decay and disorder and subsequently restored, organized, and rehoused in the internationally funded AHPN. If democratization can be measured by access to the archive, Weld shows how this access came about, and how this process of opening the archive shapes the quality of democracy.

The book is organized in four parts. The first examines the immediate context of the (re)discovery of the documents and the commencement of the project to restore them and create the AHPN. The second returns to the period of repression to look at the construction of the document collection itself, as well as the development of the National Police, the institution that created the documents. Part 3 looks at the role of the construction of the AHPN in sociopolitical processes in the postwar period, focusing on the experiences of those involved in the project. And part 4 concludes the book by evaluating the impact of the completed archival recovery project on the postwar sociopolitical horizon in Guatemala and on other human rights and transitional justice initiatives locally

This is a work of ethnographic history, mixing ethnography of the project to reconstruct an archive in the years 2005-9 with archival work on the creation of the original document collection in the 1960s and 70s. The book illustrates the shifts in values and beliefs on the part of various groups involved in the reconstruction of the archive, from ex-revolutionaries to a younger generation of human rights activists and even police archivists themselves. It charts the way these actors reevaluate their memories and understandings of the revolutionary struggle and the period of state repression, at the same time as they reevaluate their understanding of relations between different groups in society in the post-authoritarian period.

This is the major contribution of Weld’s work: she shows that the synthetic process of creating the archives, reorganizing the documents from a logic of counterinsurgency to a logic of “agency and aperture” (p. 31), can be seen as a parallel for the transformation of society in the postwar period. Part 3, “Archives and Social Reconstruction in Guatemala,” explores this process. In this section, we see how the older generation of project workers struggled to work alongside the police and how the younger generation of activists within the project were confronted with things like working under a professional management structure and accepting foreign funding. Working together on a common goal—the reconstruction of the archives—allowed each of these groups to develop an understanding of each other. This is the synthesis that is produced when Cold War archives were transformed into postwar archives, a process that, she argues, is an example of bottom-up democratization and social reconstruction. Through an ethnographic account of a grassroots project, Weld shows us that transitions are created from the bottom-up, rather than top-down.

An associated argument that Weld makes is that archives and archival surveillance should be integrated into the study of the Cold War. Part 2, “Archives and Counterinsurgency in Guatemala,” looks specifically at the Cold War period and supports this argument by recounting the assistance offered by US development agencies to help the Guatemalan National Police address their poor organizational infrastructure, including their lack of attention to record keeping. In this section, she draws on the archives of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA, the predecessor of USAID) to show that the US saw record keeping as directly contributing to their ability to control subversion. She demonstrates a clear link between this goal, which necessitated a strengthening of the capacity of the security forces and the technical assistance the ICA provided in the realm of record keeping. This is a clearly substantiated and illustrated argument which calls for further consideration of the types of everyday, mundane technical development assistance that was used to wage the Cold War in Latin America and beyond. She shows us that technical assistance, including that of record keeping, functioned as an extremely effective conduit for the transfer of ideas and the reshaping of ideology through the reshaping of practice.

Weld’s purpose in conducting this ethnography was, as she eloquently puts it, “to document the process, not process the documents” (p. 23). This marks her contribution as distinct from the other studies that have emerged in recent years of recovered counterinsurgency and police archives across Latin America. These studies draw on declassified and (re)discovered materials to write new histories of the Cold War and state repression in the region. Her work goes beyond this and sits comfortably alongside Duke’s other critical and reflexive monographs on archives.[1] While most critical work on archives looks at colonial archives, Weld extends these insights into both Cold War archives and postwar archives.

With this book Weld seeks to examine the process by which Guatemalans make sense of both the physical records of the past and of their memories of that past, analyzing this process for traces of articulations about the future. Her ethnography deftly achieves this, while at the same time it demonstrates the applicability of theoretical reflections on archives to new contexts, and expands our critical understanding of the Cold War and of the postwar in Guatemala. This book is therefore recommended for researchers interested in expanding their understanding of either of these two periods—the Cold War or the postwar period—with theoretical insights that can and should be tested in other contexts.

Note

[1]. Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=48085

Citation: Michelle Carmody. Review of Weld, Kirsten, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. March, 2017.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48085

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ANN: The Cold War in Latin America: Reviews of New Works

by Casey Lurtz


Continuing our series of collected reviews of new works in Latin American history, I'm happy to bring you a brief special issue on the Cold War in Latin America. As well as new reviews of Kirsten Weld's Paper Cadavers and Patrick Iber's Neither Peace nor Freedom, we have a review of the conference "Traveling Technocrats: Experts and Expertise in Latin America’s Long Cold War" held at Yale in the fall of 2016. I have also included cross-listings of roundtables put together by the H-Diplo network on other relevant works not yet reviewed for H-Latam.

New Reviews

Michelle Carmody on Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014)

Stella Krepp on Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (2015)

Timothy W. Lorek and Andra B. Chastain on “Traveling Technocrats: Experts and Expertise in Latin America’s Long Cold War” (2016)

Relevant Roundtables from Other Networks

Thomas C. Field, Jr.  From Development to Dictatorship:  Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (2014), roundtable from H-Diplo, March 2015

Michael E. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus:  Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (2014), roundtable from H-Diplo, April 2015

Alan McPherson, The Invaded:  How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (2014), roundtable from H-Diplo, July 2015

William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba:  The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (2014), roundtable from H-Diplo, August 2015

Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War:  Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (2015), roundtable from H-Diplo, November 2016